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I read Christof Koch’s Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist a few months back & I agree with Kathleen Reeves’ take on the book. The only thing she leaves out of her review is the dishonest tease of the word “confessions” in the title. In the introductory pages & throughout the book, Koch hints that he will reveal how some personal experience that transformed his thinking. But all the reader gets is a superficial description of the author’s predictable midlife crisis in which he leaves his wife & drinks too much pinot noir, neither of which affect his smug scientism in the least. For a book about consciousness, there is very little evidence of self-consciousness, in the sense of self-knowledge. I kept thinking how adolescent the book seemed.

Schopenhauer himself hardly practiced the pessimistic asceticism he preached: he was fond of the pleasures of the table; enjoyed many sensual affairs; was quarrelsome, greedy, and obsessed with his fame. He also kept a poodle named Atma–Sanskrit for “world soul.”

At least my terriers don’t have pretentious names. (Jett, Dash, & Candy, since you ask. And since they are all rescues, they came to us with those names already given.)